First post, by SmokyWhisky
Hello, I'm trying to use a real 3dfx Voodoo card in a relatively modern (well, about 7-8 years old now, 2nd gen Core i7 based) system by booting it into FreeDOS from a USB stick and running DOS games that support Voodoo cards from there. Is something like this even supposed to work, because I sure as hell cannot get any of the three games I've tried so far on two different cards to run properly?
Games I've tried are Descent 2, the GTA1 3dfx demo and the first Tomb Raider (both Voodoo 1 and Voodoo Rush versions). Cards I have on hand are an unknown Voodoo1 board and a Gainward Dragon 3000 Green (based on a sticker on the card) Vodooo2 board. Mostly the games just don't start at all, refuse to detect the Voodoo card, show a black screen or hang the machine. V1 board + GTA1 demo goes a bit farther though: game starts, but all I see from the Voodoo's video output is a garbled mess of pixels. I'd try the full version of GTA1 too (which apparently even has official support for V2) but I don't have it anymore, and Rockstar's free release unfortunately only included the Windows port if I remember correctly.
D2 and TR1 do run fine in software mode by the way (albeit without sound of course), so it's just the Voodoo support that is a problem.
I know that when running games that were made for the V1 on a V2 I should run a batch file which sets some environment variables before starting the game, but that didn't seem to help. The Voodoo Rush patch for Tomb Raider also seemed to require a glide2x.ovl file which I took from a Voodoo2 driver pack from here.
I'm not sure if the cards are functional (the V2 should be, but it's been years since it was last used), in fact I was trying to get this setup to work to see if they still are. Both are visible in Linux (and according to lspci -v have 16MB of memory space reserved), so at least they aren't completely dead. I was also interested in perhaps trying to write a bit of code to make the cards do something from Linux, like at least switch the VGA output on, maybe even draw a few polys on screen...
(also I didn't try any of this with both cards installed in the machine at the same time of course)